If you’ve been following my real estate adventures (follies?), you may recall that I had an extended dalliance with the idea of buying a farmhouse with a barn in Upstate New York last summer. I fell in love with the idea, but researched it and estimated costs of repairs and was overwhelmed with the idea of taking on restoration of a barn, maintenance on a house, and the need to gut a second house on the property. It seemed like a project that would consume all of my time and money, but there was still a strong attraction to the idea, and I dragged out a decision over a couple months. Finally, the property did sell to someone else, and even though I knew it was probably for the best that I missed out on it, it still made me a little sad, like I had lost an opportunity.
So, fast forward to winter of 2026, and I see another farmhouse and barn on the market, this time in western New Jersey not far from Frenchtown. And unlike the beat-up and ready-to-crumble barn of the Upstate New York property, this barn looked pretty good. The farmhouse looked okay, it definitely needs a lot of work, but of course I was drawn to this beautiful red barn. And, how about this idea: there is a second red barn on the property! A farmhouse, one big red barn, a smaller red barn, all on two acres of land. It’s surrounded by another 50 acres of land, which I had been told has been set aside as preserved land for the next 85 years. So no concern about a developer coming in and building 25 McMansions in my backyard, if I were to buy it.
So I had to go see it … and I did, in early March. Unlike the property in Upstate New York, which had a beautiful farmhouse and beat-up barn, this one in western New Jersey had a mediocre farmhouse and a great barn. The farmhouse was a bit tricky to assess in that the original structure, dating to around 1900, had two more-modern additions on either end, and at some point an owner decided to split off part of it into a separate apartment. So, in order to see the whole farmhouse, I had to go in one end and look around, then go back outside and down to the other end to enter and look around. It wouldn’t be a big deal to re-open the wall that had been sealed, but since I have no interest in having a tenant, by pushing this back to a single family residence would find me dealing with two kitchens and probably getting rid of one.
As you can see from the picture above, it looks pretty good from the outside, condition-wise. The current owner had stopped living there and I was told some pipes had burst during the winter, but it wasn’t so bad, at least from what I could see inside the farmhouse. This is part of my problem with assessing a property like this – there’s so much about home structures and systems (like an oil heat system with radiators and water coming from a well) that I know nothing about and would need to learn if I were to take on this property.
There’s plenty more to this story – stay tuned!